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The Southern California Carbon Sequestration Research Consortium (SoCalCarb) is a collaborative research group bringing together scientists and engineers from more than 10 public agencies, private companies, and universities to identify and validate the best regional opportunities for keeping
CO2 out of the atmosphere, thereby reducing our anthropogenic impact on the climate.

Led by Terralog Technologies
USA, with funding support by the US Department of Energy and the
California Energy Commission, SoCalCarb is pursuing characterization
studies for large scale CO2 sequestration both onshore and offshore
Southern California.

Within Southern California, SoCalCarb is identifying the major stationary sources of
CO2, such as power plants and oil refineries; determining the potential for storing
CO2 in geologic formations; and assessing the feasibility of transporting
CO2 via pipelines from major CO2 sources to storage sites, which potentially include numerous mature oil fields and deep saline rock formations. SoCalCarb’s objective is to determine the technical and economic feasibility of using these geologic formations for long-term storage, as well as link options for capture, transportation, and geological storage within the environmental and regulatory framework, thus defining sequestration scenarios and potential outcomes for the region.

SoCalCarb benefits from the built infrastructure and natural geologic formations that exist throughout the region. Our unique mix of refineries, power plants, pipelines, gas storage facilities and geology makes Southern California an ideal location for carbon capture and sequestration research and implementation.

The DOE combines SoCalCarb’s findings with
those of the other project award recipients and regional
sequestration partnerships to create the interactive National Carbon
Explorer (NATCARB)
to better understand how regional sequestration can help the United
States and Canada reduce CO2 emissions and mitigate
climate change impacts.

The science and technology
employed in these projects may point the way to a future in which
carbon emissions from manufacturing operations are commonly stored
far below the Earth’s surface, rather than being emitted into the
atmosphere.